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FastVLM: Efficient Vision Encoding for Vision Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) enable visual understanding alongside textual inputs. They are typically built by passing visual tokens from a pretrained vision encoder to a pretrained Large Language Model (LLM) through a projection layer. By leveraging the rich visual representations of the vision encoder and the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of the LLM, VLMs can be useful for a wide range of applications, including accessibility assistants, UI navigation, robotics, and gaming. VLM

Wheel World is the feel-good game of the summer

Momentum is what Wheel World does best. It is the feeling of reaching a downhill section of road, a pristine Sega-blue sea stretching out in the far distance, and letting gravity, the weight of your bicycle, and slope do all the work. Release the right trigger, the button used to peddle, and simply careen down the gently curving asphalt. It’s as if you’re flying — the wind in your hair and shirt fluttering on your back, coasting to wherever the road takes you. Wheel World is an undeniably feel-

4 things Proton's privacy-first AI chatbot Lumo can do - and how to try it

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Proton, the company responsible for Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and more services, is planning to launch a new AI chatbot called Lumo that aims to preserve your privacy. This new chatbot can do things like summarize documents, create code, and just about anything the other chatbots can do. 1. Stores data locally The difference between Lumo and other chatbots is that Lumo stores all data locally, so you don't have to worry that the company has access to your data. Pro

What to Expect from Debian/Trixie

Debian v13 with codename trixie is scheduled to be published as new stable release on 9th of August 2025. I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for the upcoming stable release (my efforts for trixie started in August 2024). On the one hand, to make sure packages we care about are available and actually make it into the release. On the other hand, to ensure there are no severe issues that make it into the release and to get proper and working upgrades. So far eve

European authorities arrest alleged admin of notorious Russian crime forum XSS

In Brief European officials have confirmed the arrest of the alleged administrator behind XSS.is, one of the longest-running Russian-language cybercrime forums. Per Europol, the alleged administrator was arrested in Ukraine on Tuesday. A law enforcement notice on XSS now reads: “This domain has been seized.” According to a statement by prosecutors in Paris, French authorities obtained a court order to conduct surveillance on a Jabber server used by the administrator for instant messaging. The

Ukraine arrests suspected admin of XSS Russian hacking forum

The suspected administrator of the Russian-speaking hacking forum XSS.is was arrested by the Ukrainian authorities yesterday at the request of the Paris public prosecutor's office. The French authorities state that the investigation was opened roughly four years ago, uncovering activities related to ransomware and other cybercrimes, which yielded multi-million-dollar profits. This was despite the forum publicly banning all ransomware topics on the platform in May 2021. "The investigation, ope

The Surprising gRPC Client Bottleneck in Low-Latency Networks

The Surprising gRPC Client Bottleneck in Low-Latency Networks — and How to Get Around It Evgeniy Ivanov 9 min read · Just now Just now -- Listen Share Zoom image will be displayed “Improving anything but the bottleneck is an illusion.” — Eliyahu M. Goldratt At YDB, we use gRPC to expose our database API to clients. Therefore, all our load generators and benchmarks are gRPC clients. Recently, we discovered that the fewer cluster nodes we have, the harder it is for the benchmark to load the clu

Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

This is the 35th post in an ongoing series describing new privacy features in Brave. This post describes work done by Pavel Beloborodov (Senior Software Engineer) and Brian Johnson (Principal Engineer). It was written by Shivan Kaul Sahib (VP, Privacy and Security). Starting in version 1.81 for Windows users, Brave browser will block Microsoft Recall from automatically taking screenshots of your browsing activity. Why we’re doing this Microsoft first announced Recall in May 2024 and immediate

Conduct rules are coming for Google and Apple in the UK

Apple and Google face new rules governing how they run their smartphone software and app stores in the UK, as Britain’s antitrust agency looks to impose new European-style controls on the Big Tech companies. The proposed interventions could trim fees of up to 30 percent that Apple and Google charge for digital transactions through their mobile app stores, as well as prevent them from designing their systems to favor their own apps and services. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority on Wed

Proton throws shade at Apple Intelligence privacy as it launches AI chatbot

The company behind encrypted email service Proton Mail has today launched a new freemium AI chatbot which promises that your chats will remain completely private. Proton Lumo offers five protections it says aren’t matched by any of the existing mainstream AI services like ChatGPT and Gemini, and has even thrown shade at Apple Intelligence privacy … Proton Lumo AI chatbot Proton said it launched Lumo because the benefits of AI are too great to miss, but the privacy risks are too serious to ign

Microsoft just upgraded Sentinel with an AI-powered data lake - here's how it works

NurPhoto/Contributor/Getty Microsoft is launching a new agentic AI system to help cybersecurity professionals manage and protect their organizations' data, the company said Tuesday. Microsoft Sentinel, a proprietary Security Incidents and Event Management (SEIM) platform, which debuted in 2019, now comes with a data lake -- that is, a centralized repository that can store structured and unstructured data without any kind of reformatting. Also: Microsoft fixes two SharePoint zero-days under at

How to Recycle Your Old Computers and Printers for Free

It's weirdly difficult to get rid of old laptops, desktops and printers sitting around your house -- even when it's been over a decade since you last plugged them in. But recycling old tech is easier than you think and can free up a lot of space for you. A CNET survey found that 31% of US adults are still holding onto old, unused devices, including laptops, because they're unsure of what to do with them. The survey also found that 19% of respondents just toss old devices in the trash -- which i

What will become of the CIA?

In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, pondering

How earthquake alerts work on Android - and how to make sure they're enabled on your phone

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET The next time you get an alert on your Android phone, it might just be life‑saving information. Google researchers report that since rolling out the Android Earthquake Alerts System in 2021, it has detected and issued warnings for over 2,000 earthquakes, delivering anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds of advance notice before the strongest shaking arrives. In total, about 790 million alerts have been sent to phones worldwide. Also: Storms and bad weather? How to prep yo

EPA Employees Still in the Dark as Agency Dismantles Scientific Research Office

Employees of the crucial scientific research arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been left with more questions than answers as the agency moves to officially wind down the office following months of back-and-forth. On Friday evening, the EPA issued a press release announcing a reduction in force at the Office of Research and Development (ORD), citing the move as part of a larger effort to save a purported $748.8 million. On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in

Ted Lasso Kicks Off Filming for Season 4 in Kansas City. Here's What We Know So Far

Macy Meyer Writer II Macy Meyer is a North Carolina native who graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a BA in English and a second BA in Journalism. Macy is a Writer on the CNET How-To team, covering a variety of topics, including home security, fitness and nutrition, smart home tech and more. In each article, Macy helps readers get the most out of their home, tech and wellness. When Macy isn't writing, she's volunteering, traveling, walking her dog, Holden, or watching sports.

Topics: ba home macy meyer tech

Ted Lasso Kicks Off Season 4 Filming in Kansas City. Here's What We Know So Far

Macy Meyer Writer II Macy Meyer is a North Carolina native who graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a BA in English and a second BA in Journalism. Macy is a Writer on the CNET How-To team, covering a variety of topics, including home security, fitness and nutrition, smart home tech and more. In each article, Macy helps readers get the most out of their home, tech and wellness. When Macy isn't writing, she's volunteering, traveling, walking her dog, Holden, or watching sports.

Topics: ba home macy meyer tech

What Will Become of the CIA?

In December, 1988, as the Soviet Union was beginning to come apart, Senator Bill Bradley, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, convened a closed-door hearing with several of the C.I.A.’s top Soviet experts. These were analysts, not operatives. They did not run spies or weapons, or shoot poisoned darts at people; mostly, they sat at their desks at Langley, reading Pravda or studying photographs of Soviet military parades. The hearing found them in a melancholy mood, pondering

AI voice company Hyper raises $6.3M to help automate 911 calls

“My whole life has been preparing me for this moment,” Ben Sanders said when asked about why he launched his emergency response startup Hyper. The company announced Monday a $6.3 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, as well as an official emergence from stealth. As a child, he so wanted to become a police officer that he had his mother sew yellow stripes on his navy sweatpants. He wore that with an officer’s rain hat for an entire year. As he grew up, he worked at the intersection of tech

We made Postgres writes faster, but it broke replication

We Made Postgres Writes Faster, but it Broke Replication +2 By Stu Hood, Ming Ying, Mathew Pregasen, and Olive Ratliff on June 30, 2025 When we built pg_search , the Postgres extension for search and analytics, write throughput was a priority. To be an effective alternative to Elasticsearch we needed to support high ingest workloads in real time. This is because many Elasticsearch use cases — like real-time dashboards, e-commerce search, and recommendation systems — involve continuous writes t

Spanish police arrest five over $542M crypto investment scheme

Spanish law enforcement arrested five people suspected of running an international cryptocurrency investment fraud scheme that laundered more than €460 million ($542 million) from over 5,000 victims worldwide, according to a statement from Europol. The suspects, based in Madrid and the Canary Islands, allegedly operated a global network of accomplices who collected money through cash deposits, wire transfers and cryptocurrency transactions. According to Spain’s Guardia Civil, the criminal ring

These are our favorite cyber books on hacking, espionage, crypto, surveillance, and more

In the last 30 years or so, cybersecurity has gone from being a niche specialty within the larger field of computer science, to an industry estimated to be worth more than $170 billion made of a globe-spanning community of hackers. In turn, the industry’s growth, and high-profile hacks such as the 2015 Sony breach, the 2016 U.S. election hack and leak operations, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, and a seemingly endless list of Chinese government hacks, have made cybersecurity and hacking

Piramidal (YC W24) is hiring a full stack engineer

We are looking for a software engineer to help us enable interactions and automations with Piramidal’s newest technologies. We value proactive, customer-centric engineers who prioritize foundational details (data models, architecture, security) to enable excellent products. In this role you will: Build and maintain the infrastructure and backend systems for our flagship platform focused on neural data. Collaborate closely with ML engineers to iterate on applying our latest models. and Work w

Piano Keys

Piano Keys If you've ever looked closely at a piano keyboard you may have noticed that the widths of the white keys are not all the same at the back ends (where they pass between the black keys). Of course, if you think about it for a minute, it's clear they couldn't possibly all be the same width, assuming the black keys are all identical (with non-zero width) and the white keys all have equal widths at the front ends, because the only simultaneous solution of 3W=3w+2b and 4W=4w+3b is with b=0

Tesla Tries to Save the Cybertruck With Its Most Desperate Offer Yet

Less than two years after its hyped-up debut, Tesla is making an aggressive, almost desperate, move to salvage the Cybertruck, a vehicle widely seen as one of the biggest busts in recent automotive history. Faced with production woes, quality control nightmares, and underwhelming sales, the company has added its polarizing truck to a massive sales event, offering a powerful incentive it has historically reserved for its most loyal customers: a free transfer of its $12,000 Full Self-Driving (FSD

Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

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Asynchrony is not concurrency

Yes I know about that one talk from Rob Pike. The title of this blog post is not something you hear people say often, if ever. What you do hear people say is “concurrency is not parallelism”, but that’s not as useful, in my opinion. Let’s see how Wikipedia defines those terms: Concurrency refers to the ability of a system to execute multiple tasks through simultaneous execution or time-sharing (context switching) Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or proce

Broadcom to discontinue free Bitnami Helm charts

📢 Overview As of August 28th, 2025, the Bitnami public catalog will undergo the following changes: Community catalog Disable images generation for Debian-based images and gradually move existing ones to a Bitnami Legacy repository. A focused set of more hardened, more secure images. These free images are intended for development and are only available on the “latest” tag. You can find them at https://hub.docker.com/u/bitnamisecure. Helm charts and container images' open-source code will contin